À la recherche de l’amour perdu : Sérotonine de Michel Houellebecq

• Authors: Voldřichová Beránková Eva

Title variants

EN

IN SEARCH OF LOST LOVE: SEROTONIN BY MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ

• Languages of publication: FR

Abstracts

EN

Serotonin (2019) undoubtedly represents Michel Houellebecq’s most “Proustian” novel. His narrator, a forty-six-year-old agricultural engineer, who became desperately impotent by a regular absorption of “new-generation anti-depressants”, scrutinizes his “phallocentric memory” to revisit all his missed appointments with the great Romantic Love that could have saved him. Our analysis proves that Serotonin is not just a “prefiguration of the Yellow vests movement”, an “illustration of European agricultural crisis” or a “conservative flirt with Christianism” (which commentators are accustomed to identify in Houellebecq’s work) but also a somewhat astonishing reflection on the functioning of memory and the mechanisms of love.

Keywords

FR

Marcel Proust; Michel Houellebecq; Sérotonine; mémoire; amour

EN

Marcel Proust; Michel Houellebecq; Serotonin; memory; love

• Publisher: Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Arts, Czech Republic
• Journal: Svět literatury – Časopis pro novodobé literatury (World of Literature – Journal for Modern Literatures)
• Year: 2020
• Volume: XXX
• Issue: Zvláštní číslo – Le monde de la littérature
• Pages: 215-224

Contributors

author

Voldřichová Beránková Eva

• Université Charles

Identifiers

DOI

10.14712/23366729.2020.3.19